Page 1 of 1

Screen flashes at boot, grub fails to initialize

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 5:34 pm
by Panruru
I just installed Mint Debian on a Samsung laptop with an i3 processor. The installation went fine, but when I try to boot it up the screen flashes on and off continuously. When I put in a live cd it starts behaving normally, and I can boot it by selecting "boot from local drive". When I do this, it goes to the grub splash screen and boots as normal. Can anyone shed any light on this problem?

Re: Screen flashes at boot, grub fails to initialize

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 6:04 pm
by ctigs
Does the system ever make it to the boot menu?

Re: Screen flashes at boot, grub fails to initialize

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 6:13 pm
by zerozero
[moved here by moderator]

Re: Screen flashes at boot, grub fails to initialize

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 6:39 pm
by Panruru
ctigs wrote:Does the system ever make it to the boot menu?
No, not unless I use a live CD.

Re: Screen flashes at boot, grub fails to initialize

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 8:09 pm
by wayne128
Try to reinstall grub2 onto MBR of your hard disk.

Re: Screen flashes at boot, grub fails to initialize

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 3:23 am
by herostrates
Hi,

I'm facing the same issue with LMDE 2013.03 Cinnamon stable. After successful installation (with Grub in MBR), the computer restarts over and over when it should display the Grub menu. I see only black screen flashing continuously. When I boot from live cd, its Grub shows up and I can boot from local disk using menu and then my own Grub is run and it works fine.

I tried reinstalling Grub and the whole system (with recreating the partition table). Setting Grub timeout to 0 also didn't help. My computer is Samsung NP300E5A laptop.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Re: Screen flashes at boot, grub fails to initialize

Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 8:49 am
by herostrates
I tried MATE edition and installing Grub on partition instead of MBR. No effect - computer keeps restarting instead of starting Grub.
And for the record - I have disabled EFI boot in BIOS.

Boot repair info:
http://paste.debian.net/243991/

Re: Screen flashes at boot, grub fails to initialize

Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 2:10 pm
by herostrates
I managed to fix the problem by setting boot flag to sda1 manually.
Why did I have to? Grub is installed in MBR.